Life Habits
Cone snails are carnivorous, and predatory. They hunt and eat prey such as marine worms, small fish, mollusks, and even other cone snails. Because cone snails are slow-moving, they use a venomous harpoon (called a toxoglossan radula) to capture faster-moving prey such as fish. The venom of a few larger species, especially the piscivorous ones, is powerful enough to kill a human being.
The osphradium (a chemoreceptory organ) in the family Conidae is more highly specialized than the same organ in any other family of gastropods. It is through this sensory modality that cone snails become aware of the presence of a prey animal, not through vision. The cone snails immobilize their prey using a modified, dartlike, barbed radular tooth, made of chitin, along with a poison gland containing neurotoxins. Small species of these cone snails hunt small prey such as marine worms, whereas larger cone snails hunt live fish.
Molecular phylogeny research by Kraus et al. (2010) based on a part of "intron 9" of the gamma-glutamyl carboxylase gene has shown that feeding on fish in Conus has evolved at least twice independently.
Read more about this topic: Conus
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or habits:
“I have no scheme about it,—no designs on men at all; and, if I had, my mode would be to tempt them with the fruit, and not with the manure. To what end do I lead a simple life at all, pray? That I may teach others to simplify their lives?—and so all our lives be simplified merely, like an algebraic formula? Or not, rather, that I may make use of the ground I have cleared, to live more worthily and profitably?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)